Then, six weeks after Host's premiere and less than five months after Savage's prank first went viral, his life changed forever. The movie premiered in July and received a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes (opens in a new tab). He spent the next three months working on a feature-length version of the Zoom prank - a horror movie called Host - with frequent collaborator Jed Shepherd and writer Gemma Hurley, which they then sold to the streaming platform Shudder. The monster in question turned out to be a clip from the 2007 movie Rec, and the whole incident a craftily-engineered prank - but the subsequent effects on Savage's career have been very real. Holding the laptop at arm's length while on a ladder, he panned it slowly around the darkness - only for a monster to suddenly come lurching out of the shadows and send Savage tumbling back down to the landing, while his friends looked on in horror. As his friends looked on via their laptop screens, he grabbed a knife from his kitchen drawer and went to investigate. During one of these group Zoom sessions, Savage announced that he'd been hearing noises - possibly footsteps - coming from his attic.

Video calls were essentially the only way of keeping in touch with friends. When film-maker Rob Savage decided to prank his friends over Zoom, he wasn't expecting it to end with a massive movie deal.Īt the time, back in April, the UK was in the midst of its strictest coronavirus lockdown measures.

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